Blue Coat Systems protects and serves corporate networks. Its proxy appliances protect networks from viruses and other security threats and improve network performance. The devices provide Web content filtering, virus and spyware protection, user authentication, and the ability to limit or block peer-to-peer applications such as instant messaging. They can also be configured to provide WAN acceleration, speeding the delivery of business applications with Blue Coat's bandwidth management, protocol optimization, compression, and caching technologies. In 2016 Symantec agreed to buy Blue Coat for $4.6 billion. In 2015 Bain Capital bought Blue Coat for $2.4 billion from private equity investor Thoma Bravo, which paid $1.3 billion in 2012.